The Key is an immersive narrative that won the Tribeca Storyscapes and the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It uses embodied metaphors and dream logic as a mode of storytelling, and these innovations are extremely effective and powerful as reflecting by the experience winning the top awards at Tribeca and Venice. The director and producer Céline Tricart is a lucid dreamer, who sees virtual reality as her preferred medium as expression since it’s the closest to the experiences that she has has within her lucid dreaming experiences.
I recommend waiting to see this experience before listening to this podcast episode. It will be available to be seen at Oculus Connect and it should also be available on the Oculus store before the end of the year. We unpack the metaphors of the piece, and talk more about her process of creating it, and using dream logic and metaphor as a mode of spatial storytelling.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So continuing on in my series of dreams, dream logic, and the symbolic storytelling language of virtual reality, today's episode features Celine Trichardt of The Key. So before we dive in into giving any more context, I just want to give a bit of an alert to say that it's actually probably best to see this experience first. It's going to be eventually released on the Oculus Store sometime probably before the end of the year, 2019. It's actually going to be available at Oculus Connect. So if you're going to be at Oculus Connect, really try to see this. I highly, highly recommend it. It actually won both the Storyscapes at Tribeca as well as the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. So it's a really, really great experience. But also, you know, the less you know about it, the better. Just go see it. So if you have seen it, then stick around and we're going to be unpacking different aspects of the experience and talking to Selene about it, her journey into VR, as well as just some of the metaphorical language that she's using within this experience. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Selene happened on Saturday, April 27th, 2019 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:33.404] Celine Tricart: Hi, my name is Céline Tricart. I am a director and a producer. I've been involved in virtual reality for about five years now. Before that, I was in the film industry and I was an expert in stereoscopic 3D. So since very early on, actually since film school really, I was interested in technology. I kind of have an engineer mindset, but also storytelling is the most important thing for me. the intersection between storytelling and technology is really where I want to be.
[00:02:03.773] Kent Bye: So I know that you've done quite a bit of cinematography for other projects, but also getting into more of directing of your own projects. So maybe you could talk a bit about what you see as like the milestone projects of your evolution and history of VR that's leading up to now.
[00:02:23.284] Celine Tricart: My very first virtual reality film was a 360-degree video that I was hired by 3ality Technica and Nokia. Nokia was building this VR camera that became the OZO, but it was just a prototype at the time. And they were looking for filmmakers to play with it and come up with stuff. And so me and Steve Sclair from 3ality decided to make a fake documentary like a hybrid document reenactment of it was in June 2015 if I'm not mistaken I have to check this so we decided to make a documentary about the Obergefell case which is when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of same-sex marriage for all 50 states and so that was my very first project and it's called marriage equality After that, I was involved in a lot of different VR projects, mostly as a DP or as a technician, learning my craft and trying to understand the language of VR and trying to do my own project on the side. But it's a difficult medium when you're a creator and a storyteller, because how do you go and raise money, right? There's very, very few places where you actually raise money. And when you don't have a track record like I did at the time, nobody really wanted to trust me, which I understand. So I guess my next big project really was the Sun Ladies, which we already talked together about, which was premier attendance last year, 2018. and for that that's the funny story that was actually hired as a dp of that film maria bello wanted had a director christian seven and she wanted a female dp to go and film that story about women so she hired me as a dp i went to iraq we shot the documentary and then i kind of I was so passionate about the story that I continued helping. I found the crew for post-production. I was part of the editing. And then Maria and Christian were like, Celine, you know, you should be the co-director. I was like, no, no, no. I don't want to take other people's credits. Like, no, no, you have to be the co-director. You also have to be the producer. So they insisted for a while. And then I finally said yes. And finally, this became my first known project as a director was The Sand Ladies. After that, all those years I had applied to the Creators Lab, which is the Oculus VR for Good program, where they select a small group of creators and they pair those creators with non-profits and create VR together under the support of Oculus. So I had applied two years in a row, I didn't get in. And so for the third year, I didn't want to apply. I was like, well, moving on, you know? And my friend Ryan, who was in the program himself, Insisted that I apply for the third time. It's like Celine. It's for you. Please apply I was like, okay, whatever and I think I copy past my application from year two and I sent it and to my surprise I was selected and That's when I was paired with the nonprofit friends of refugees based in Clarkston in Georgia, and that's where the key started
[00:05:34.155] Kent Bye: So yeah, that gives a really good sense of your evolution and journey in VR because I know that you started with shooting a lot of different projects and when we first talked last year on the podcast with Sun Ladies and which by the way was an amazing piece and an amazing story that was really hitting a very unique moment in the history of all that was happening in the world and that Specific topic was quite powerful. But now you're here at Tribeca of 2019 with the key, which is actually not 360 videos a CGI piece So maybe you could talk a bit about this process you get paired up to this nonprofit for the Oculus for good and you're able to then start to work out, like, how do we tell the story? So maybe you could walk through that process of working with this nonprofit to maybe get a better sense of what the deeper story that they were trying to tell, and then how you would use the medium of virtual reality to be able to tell that story.
[00:06:28.924] Celine Tricart: When I got paired with Friends of the Refugee, my first reaction was, oh, no. You know, I went to Iraq a couple of times. I've been to refugee camp. I know the stories, but I also know that it's really hard to make a story about refugee that people will care about. We kind of had the same problem with Sun Ladies. I remember we talked about that on the first podcast. It's like this fatigue towards the story of the war, ISIS, and now refugee, the Syrian refugee crisis. And so how do we create a piece of VR that people want to see and that would help my friends at the nonprofit, at Friends of the Refugee, And so I was telling Lauren Brockett from Friend of the Refugee about that. I was like, I don't want to do a straightforward, fact-based, dry documentary about refugees because people won't be interested. They won't relate. And she was like, okay, I get it. So she just started bouncing ideas at me and she started telling me some facts about refugees, see if it would like get some ideas going. And then she told me the story that even though I've been to refugee camps, I didn't know that story that most refugees even though they will probably never go back home, like 20 years after they left their country, or their house has been taken from them, or their house has been destroyed, most of the refugees always keep the key to their house. And it's this one little object that it's very hard to let go emotionally. The minute she said that, I could see the star in front of my eyes. That's when everything came together. And I remember we were up in San Francisco, where Oculus brought us all together. And after the end of the afternoon, they were like, now the team can go and pitch. And I was like, what are you talking about? We just met each other. Do whatever you want. Step in front of everyone and pitch your story. It doesn't have to be a real story. It's just an exercise. And we went on stage, and I literally pitched the story of the key, as you've seen it yesterday. It was just this one moment where Lauren told me the story. That was it.
[00:08:36.493] Kent Bye: It's really powerful because I didn't know that myself and and the refugee community obviously this is something that is well known but it's something that it's such a powerful story and The way that the experience unfolds is that you're kind of in this dream logic type of experience like it's very much in a lot of fantasy and you're interacting with different objects, but then Maybe you could talk a bit about the aesthetic that you have there and also what you were trying to go with in terms of the your interactions within because there's a bit of Interactive components that are in this piece and so you were trying to evoke very specific emotion through those interactions So maybe talk a bit about the setup for the story what the scene that you're painting here
[00:09:17.352] Celine Tricart: So we have this idea of the key. I know I don't want to do a straightforward story that people will build those giant emotional walls and not let themselves feel connected. So that's when we decided to make a giant metaphor and a trap, really, for the audience of saying, all right, let's make a dreamlike fantasy story where you meet this young woman named Anna Anna doesn't remember her past, she doesn't remember where she comes from, but she's having those very vivid dreams and in every one of those dreams there is this key, this key thing. She doesn't know why and so she basically asks you very kindly, hey can you help me explore my dream and figure out where I come from? And so the journey starts in what we call the Cloud House. So it's all animation, all 3D environments in the game engine, where you can explore the house. And very quickly, you will get to meet three little characters. And we call them the companions. They look like little orbs of glowing light. You have a blue one. The blue one loves to sing. You have a red one that loves to dance. And you have a yellow one that's very shy. And so you get to meet those little orbs of light and play with them a little bit. But very quickly a big storm will hit your cloud house and suck everything out of the cloud house and you have to save your companions who are being taken away by the storm. And very quickly you realize that you only have two hands and you can only save two. So which are the two you're going to be saving? And eventually the third one will be taken. so this plus the following dreams that you're going to be traveling through every time a companion is taken from you and every time you lose a companion you lose the corresponding color so your world that started very colorful ends completely black and white and that's the metaphor how along the journey of a refugee between the moment your village is being attacked or war happens and you have to leave in a hurry, you can only grab a few things and throw them in a suitcase and leave and that's it, that's all you can take. And when I was at Clarkston in Georgia with Friends of the Refugee, they made me go through what they call a loss simulation and it's extremely powerful. I'm gonna describe it very quickly. You put some post-it papers in front of you in the first column you write name of your loved ones and then second column is your most important piece of belongings and then in the third column is the stuff you like to do, your hobbies, the activities you like to practice and then they make you go through different steps and sometimes you have to look at your paper and pick a couple and throw them away or you have to put them upside down so you don't know what's written on them and like select a few and get rid of them And when you're faced with, I had a paper that says dad, I had a paper that says the name of my sister, I had a paper that says hiking, because I love hiking, I had a piece of paper that says my passport, and then you're looking at those four pieces of paper and say you can only keep one. And that's when it drew on me that the worst thing is when you get to choose what to leave behind and what to take with you. This is much harder than when somebody like get into your life and steal stuff from you. When you get to choose is the worst thing because then you carry the guilt of that choice for the rest of your life. And so that's what we've tried to do with your companion that you have to sacrifice alongside the journey. And so people get, I've been looking at a lot of people going through the experience. They always try to save all three and they come to see me after the experience. It's like, what I was supposed to do to save my companions? And I'm like, I'm sorry, but there is no saving them. The refugees are not given a choice to take all their family with them and all their belongings. That's what it is. So we travel through dreams and it's only at the very end of the dreams that the voice of Anna that we've been hearing Because we've been exploring her dreams with her, she finally understands and she takes us into the big reveal, which is we suddenly transition from animation into a photogrammetry environment, which is a destroyed house that I scanned in Mosul in Iraq two months ago. that I was looking at different houses. I really wanted it to be Iraq because that's the place I've been to and that I know. I found this destroyed house that has clothing on the ground, baby shoes on the ground, and it felt like somebody was living here and now it's just completely destroyed. So that's what we have, the big reveal at the end is everything you've been experiencing, all the dreams are metaphor for a specific moment in the life of a refugee.
[00:14:11.389] Kent Bye: It's really powerful because, you know, I had that moment of trying to grab all of the companions and only having to save one. And that as you're speaking, I recognize that things were getting darker, but I didn't correlate it to like, oh, that was completely black and white. And you find the companions, you see the light. but then you're slowly taking away that light away of the subtle changes that are in that environment so that as you go through that experience that eventually once you get to the black and white world then eventually you get put back into the color world but that's into this completely destroyed phonogrammetry house and you you hear the story that you that you had told earlier about the key. And I think it just hit me really hard. It was like, oh, wow, this is a thing that people have to go through. And it actually has some connections to Where There's Smoke by Lance Weiler, who does a very similar exercise in terms of walks you through a visualization of your house is on fire. You have one object to take. And you can only take that one object and then kind of unpacking the emotional connection that you have to those objects. And they're usually around the memories that you have. Holding on to those objects that represent those memories that were there with you But yet for me, I've seen a lot of the other VR for good and nearly all of them I've seen have taken a very pure literal 360 video approach and this is the first one I've seen that takes a more symbolic dream logic approach which is speaking more metaphorically, but I feel like there's something that's way more powerful and in fact This piece of the key is one of the five finalists in the story scapes at Tribeca which of 22 experiences There's only like a handful of like five different experiences that are up for the prize And so I think it speaks volumes in terms of the level of which that this type of story resonates with people Because, you know, there's a lot of interactions within the piece, but then there's this kind of payoff as to where this is all going. And then you kind of realize all these embodied experiences that you have are actually being translated into trying to build this sense of empathy for what other people have gone through. But in this constructed world that you're trying to, in a very short period of time, build a sense of connection and emotional meaning so that there's something that's actually at stake here. So I think that's the hardest thing in a short period of time to really give someone a feeling of loss when they've just been introduced to this world and they're not connected to. Which I think is a design problem, extremely difficult, but I think the way that I experienced it, I think it gave me that exact feeling of having those choices, going through that, and then having the big reveal there at the end, which I really actually liked the full color, the full breadth of the reality of that, because you're contrasting it to the loss, but then making it real, because now you're waking up from the dream, but you're seeing the reality of what that life is, and that everything that you experienced before is kind of like this metaphoric dream.
[00:17:03.116] Celine Tricart: And at the very end, we let the people see photos of each dream they've explored. We call them the digital canvases, which is kind of a giant touchscreen, really. And we let the participants swipe and reveal the metaphor behind each of the specific dreams. For example, there is one dream that we call the line. that has zero interaction. There's literally nothing you can do. You're in this giant line that goes all the way to the horizon. You only have one companion left, so you only have one color left in the world at this point. And you're just there for a couple of minutes, like, what am I supposed to do? And you finally get to the front of the line, and there's this giant eye monster that's, like, staring at you and judging you, and eventually will grab your last companion and smash it onto paperwork, creating a a visa stamp really, the shape as a key. And that's the metaphor is the fact that most people don't know that the average time spent in a refugee camp right now is 26 years. So there's entire generation being born and dying in refugee camp and you're in limbo. The dream you're exploring is very much limbo. You're not allowed to work. you're safe, you're far from the war, but there is literally nothing to live for. And I've spent a lot of time in refugee camp and I can tell you how beautiful the people are. I went to a couple of Yazidi camps in Iraq, IDP camps, and they're so happy to see foreigners. And like, I got invited to play pool and have tea and smoke some shisha with the refugee. They were so happy to see me. I was like, can I pay for my tea? It's like, absolutely not. but they are there for years and years and years and they're not allowed to do anything because it's not their country, they have no legal status. In the case of IDP, internally displaced people, it's different because they stay in their country, they're just moving region. But in case of refugee, they have no legal status apart from refugee doesn't let you do anything. And it's really hard to stay sane when you're in there. So that's the metaphor of the line.
[00:19:10.640] Kent Bye: Yeah, and maybe you could go through the other parts, because there's an immersive theater actor who's helping guide you into this world. So there's a whole onboarding process where you walk into the room. There's all this smoke that comes up. There's like four or five different screens. And you have this sound collar thing on as well that you're like having audio being projected up to you in this sort of ambient way. And so then you're getting information. And then someone who's not speaking, but just pointing out different things and swiping through different things. doing the whole onboarding process before you even get into the experience. And then when you come out of it, then there's like a little bit of an unpacking. So you're going backwards through the same process, but to then kind of reveal the deeper metaphors that you're explaining. So before going into the other metaphors, maybe we could just talk about that onboarding and offboarding process of really creating that installation, really trying to set a context before you go into the stream state and what you were trying to do there.
[00:20:04.750] Celine Tricart: It's super important to me. I'm very thankful we were able to make it happen at Tribeca. I think the fact that we are selected helped me convince the rest of my team that I wanted to do the live theatre. That was not part of the original project, but I was like, I really think this is how we should do it and this is how we should present it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if we'll be able to do it again because it's a difficult installation, like it's expensive, it's logistics, etc. But I'm very glad you can experience it here. Onboarding and outboarding is vital in virtual reality. I hate when I'm sitting on a chair and somebody throws a headset at me and I'm projecting into another world or a story I don't relate to. I think we should be kind and we should be respectful with our audiences. And we have to understand that it's a violent thing to be put in the VR headset. And the more we can make it nice and smooth and transitional between reality and virtual, virtual back to reality, the best the experience will be, in my opinion. It's not something you can fortunately do when you put your experience on, you know, the store for people to see. I mean, of course, thinking the introduction and the conclusion of your story can help. But here we were lucky to have this space where we can really make it happen. And on top of that, yeah, you have this live immersive theater actress in front of you looking at you straight in the eye, and she doesn't talk. but her presence makes it way more powerful because suddenly you have an actual human being. It's something that most people feel very uncomfortable with, like wait is she gonna touch me or like what's gonna happen? And so she very gently invites you to help her in exploring her dream and the VR headset becomes just a device to explore dreams. It's just a little excuse. This is not a piece of technology. This is a Dream Explorer device. So I'm very, very happy we were able to make that happen at Rebecca.
[00:22:08.748] Kent Bye: Yeah, and maybe you could tell me a bit about the sound collar thing that is put on. What's happening there?
[00:22:15.521] Celine Tricart: Because of this introduction, originally I had written a script for the actress to speak out loud, but then we were like, wait a minute, so the actress at Tribeca will have a different voice than the VO in the VR experience, which is Alia Choukat. I was super grateful to have her do the VO for The Key. And so then we decided to record Alia doing this introduction, introduction and have a more out of body experience where you look at someone and she look at you straight in the eye, but you can hear her voice in your head instead of her moving her lips. And so that's when I was like, OK, can we put speakers in the room? I was like, no, that's not going to be good. And it's actually our installation designer, Jamie McMurray, who you might know as the designer of the New Frontier venues at Sundance, who's an amazing artists and creators who accepted to design our installation for us. And I was explaining, I was like, I don't like speakers, but headphones, but then we need to swap headphones for the VR headphones are going to be very confusing. And then he found out about those sound colors that people use to listen to music while they're cooking, for example. And I cannot tell how many creators, VR creators, went through the key and were like, what is this? And I can guarantee that in the next six months, you'll see a lot of sound colors popping in VR experiences because it's a great tool.
[00:23:40.744] Kent Bye: Yeah, the South by Southwest the Bose AR frames that come out so there's sunglasses that's projecting specialized audio into your ears But this is a little bit more Ambient because you're putting it on and it's not you don't have to like have any sort of glasses on your face But it sounds like very similar to like directed sound into your ears But it sounds like it's coming from the environment or there was a experience at Sundance this year called the dial which had like bone conductance where You're able to hear open what's happening in the world. And so there's something nice with these new ways of trying to layer audio into our experience. And our brain somehow fuses it all together and figures it out. But this was nice just because it felt like it was extra ambient. And yeah, it had that sort of dreamlike quality. But yeah, this is the first time I had worn one of those as well. And it was nice to be introduced to the technology in that way as well. But maybe we could go back to the different metaphors, because I think it's very rich in terms of each of the panels. And when I saw it, I was able to sort of read it, but I don't think I was able to kind of digest like, oh, this is this point. And so it'd be nice to kind of unpack each of the other panels and what the symbolism was in the piece and how that connected to the deeper story of the refugees that you're trying to tell.
[00:24:53.752] Celine Tricart: Yeah, I don't think anyone is supposed to understand every single detail. For example, the colors, right? Every time you lose a companion, you lose the corresponding color. Well, most people don't realize that, but I don't care because it's just a feeling. You feel that your world is becoming less and less. colorful, diverse, interesting, you know, exciting. So I don't care if you don't understand the details, that's fine. I just wanted to say also, I'm happy to go into details, but I really want your audience to experience the key before, you know, there's like, I hope you guys have experienced the key. It's going to be on the Oculus Store at some point before you listen to this podcast. I should have said that at the very beginning.
[00:25:37.148] Kent Bye: Yeah, we'll put a spoiler alert and give people plenty of warning. For anybody that's listening, have the experience first. I always try to say that. I've been to conferences where they talked about the pieces before anybody in the room had seen them. And I was like, that's kind of opposite. If you can have an opportunity to see it, then you're going to get a lot more out of this conversation if you do that. So with that disclaimer, go ahead.
[00:25:59.574] Celine Tricart: Yeah, we've been very careful before Tribeca not to reveal anything about the story and not to reveal that it's about refugees. That would defeat the purpose of the metaphor, right? So, it's funny, like, they come out of the experience, they're like, I didn't know what it was about, and, like, crying. I was like, well, yeah, that's the point. Like, I wanted you to be open to feel all those emotions. and only reveal the truth at the end. Okay so well the first dream is the cloud house which represents where you come from, your house, where you feel safe. So that environment was mapped exactly on the same dimension as the photogrammetry in Iraq I did with the windows exactly positioned the same so that the reveal at the end could be more powerful. Why the cloud house? Well It's part of the metaphor, that's another layer of the metaphor. You start up in the cloud and the storm hits and destroys your cloud and then you end up in an elevator going slowly going down and then you have to be in the line on the ground forever and then finally in the last dream you get relocated to a new country and you end up in this underwater world. So you go from high in the air to deep in the sea as a metaphor of, first of all, being completely thrown off balance out of a world that is familiar and is yours, into a world where you don't understand the rules, you don't understand the language, and of course, a metaphor of sinking into limbo. So that's why we chose The Cloud Eyes. I want to also use this opportunity to say that there is an amazing artist who did all my environments. Her name is Claire Aran. She's based in Dallas. She's an amazing artist. And I was trying to, I'm not an artist myself, I don't paint or anything. And I was like, I really want it to be like watercolors. And I want it to be very silhouetted with colorful, amazing sky. And so that was me projecting ideas and I had no idea how to make it happen. And Claire came up with the environment, the dreams that you've explored, which, and I think she did a really terrific job at doing this. We were trying to get a non-gamey approach, non-realistic approach, and trying to be as artistic as possible in the vision. So the cloud house, the storm hits, destroyed your cloud house, which is a metaphor of war, obviously. And then you escape from the war into this elevator slowly going down. That came from a story that I've heard from the Friends of Rush G Lost Simulation, where I think this was during the Iraq war, where people from Baghdad piled onto buses trying to escape to Syria, which at the time was a safe place and at peace. So they tried to escape from war to Syria, but in doing so they had to pass multiple checkpoints. And the way it works, I've seen that a lot during the war against ISIS, is you get to a checkpoint and you never know who's holding it. and so you're playing life and death you don't know if it's a friendly force or an enemy holding the checkpoint and so this family had to go through all the checkpoint and every time it was some kind of militia or something and of course they were getting on the bus and stealing people's stuff like give me your money give me your watch So checkpoint after checkpoint, basically everything was stolen from them. And they get to this last checkpoint before reaching Syria. And the guys were like, you know, give me your stuff. And family was like, we really have nothing left. And they had a young daughter. And so they took the young daughter. And they've never seen their daughter since then. So that's the story that inspired the moment in the elevator when you slowly go down through the storm and you land on the ground of this very dry, devastated world and the door open and this giant monster that has a giant mouth. It doesn't have eyes or nose. He has this giant mouth because he's just hungry, hungry, hungry. And the only way you can get out of the elevator is to point at one of your companions and that's going to be fed to the monster. And only then you can move to the next level. Next level is the line, so the endless wait in refugee camp, where you're being scrutinized, you know, paperwork, who are you? Are you a terrorist? Are you really who you're saying you are? Trying to get a country to accept you. there's less than 30 countries in the world that welcome refugees. And I believe there is 195 countries in the world. I have to check that number. There's only 39 or 36 countries welcoming refugees. So it's less than 0.2% that actually get relocated. It's not what you think. It's not, millions of refugees invading our country and stealing our job. It's actually a very, very small number. And usually it's people that have been kind of handpicked by the country welcoming them because of skills, because they had family already there that they can live with this kind of thing. So this giant eye monster at the end of the line is just studying you and judging you and to get your visa to get to the next world, the new world, they will grab your last piece of hope, the last piece of home, and smash it and use it as a stamp. So that's the metaphor. The last world, oh, it's getting, yeah, it's very, very dark, as you can see. But finally, you get to what I call the foreign world. The foreign world is this weird underwater, there's mermaids, they kind of look like you, but they're mermaids, so it's like, what is this? They don't, they speak this weird language. And you're like, what am I doing here? Until a mermaid, so you're completely in black and white, you've lost all your companions. And then a mermaid will swim to you and give you a giant bubble of air. And if you reach out and grab the bubble of air and put it onto your head, suddenly colors come back into the world. So that is the metaphor for what people like Friends of the Refugees are doing, which is they go to the airport, they welcome refugees. The city of Clarkston is now the most diverse square mile in America. They have 65 nationalities in one square mile. They've been welcoming refugees since the 90s. And so people like Friends of a Refugee make sure to help refugees write a resume. It's probably the first time in their life they have to write a resume. What are your skills? And try to find them jobs. Lauren Brockett from Friends of a Refugee, who is here, her job is to place those refugees. And she's been, in the last few years overall, she's found 300 refugees a year a job in Georgia. So that's what does mermaid with their little bubble of water because they bringing color back into your world You know and so that's the moment where I now Understands remembers where she comes from and that the truth is revealed But it's also if you're living in the clouds and then all of a sudden you're living under the water.
[00:33:03.640] Kent Bye: It's also very foreign So it's a completely new and different world as well. I
[00:33:07.367] Celine Tricart: Yeah, completely. I asked Claire to make it as different and crazy as she could. And you're like, I'm looking at people going through the VR, and that's the one environment that they look around the most. What is this? They've never seen that. And actually something that I want to probably improve on the experience is I probably want to add the green color there. We haven't seen the green color because we're based on blue, yellow, and red. And a new idea I had yesterday, Yeah, we finished this experience the day we opened at Tribeca, just so you know. And it's not actually finish, finish, but working on it. So I think I want to add a dominant green color to this world, which would mean you get to create a new life now. It's never going to be the same as before, and you still feel the loss, but there is a new start.
[00:33:57.700] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the thing that has been coming up both in experiences here at Tribeca this year, but also when I went to the Vancouver International Film Festival, I saw the entire sequence of Graham Sachs' The Interpretation of Dreams, which was looking at Freud's work, but doing a virtual reality depiction of some of those dreams that were in the case studies that Freud used in order to write The Interpretation of Dreams. And there's something about dreams and dream logic and the language of symbolism that happens in dreams that feels like it's a very natural fit into virtual reality. And Graham was saying that just in the evolution of film as a medium, that dreams and film have kind of co-evolved with each other. And talking to the creators of Gymnasia, also being highly inspired by a dream type of surrealistic logic. But even the structure of the piece is like formatted as a dream and kind of suddenly waking up from a dream. But the challenge with the dreams is that you have these universal archetypes So when you see something, you know immediately what that means but then you also have personal symbols and meanings of what that specific associations mean and that the lived experience of a refugee is gonna have these metaphors for them they may be able to immediately make those connections, especially if it's their personal dream, but I see the challenge of virtual realities of filmmaking language is that if it is this symbolic logic and this dream logic then how do you take these very specific personal symbols and meaning and have it be translated in a way that people kind of get the essence. And I feel like I had an emotional experience in this piece that there was a part of like things that were operating in this like almost unconscious level like I wasn't even aware of certain things like the colors changing for example like there's these Subtle things that are changing and I'm like seeing the symbols and the meaning and then I like I know I got it At that moment that was just like this aha like this was what it was about But I don't think I would be able to go back and interpret the dreams just like you did here
[00:35:49.606] Celine Tricart: I like that and thank you for mentioning how dreams and storytelling and VR in particular are kind of like we're playing the same melody all together. I'm a lucid dreamer and VR, I remember the first time I tried, I think it was the HTC Vive, but that was the first time I did 6DOF VR. I waited six hours in line in front of a truck at Comic Con. they had this truck with a couple of VIVE stations and I waited for six hours I got in and what they were showing is the blue robot repair and till brush and it was only a 10 minute demo but after that demo I removed my headset and I was in tears because I was like I've never felt like this apart from lucid dreaming and so that was the moment I was like this is it this is what I want to do this is exactly the time of medium that I need to tell my story and Now I don't feel frustrated anymore because I know it's possible to do it, you know.
[00:36:48.524] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was my follow-up question was to ask you about your own personal dream life because I felt like you have a very sophisticated understanding of that language of dreams because if being a lucid dreamer you are somewhat conscious of your dreams and being able to interact with them. So maybe you could tell me a bit about the history and journey of you becoming a lucid dreamer.
[00:37:08.874] Celine Tricart: So lucid dreams for people who don't know is when you realize in your dreams that you are being dreaming. So it's part of your brain awakens but you manage to stay in the dream and then you can either let the dream take you or you can start controlling and making changes in the dream. And you can fly if you want to and the one thing you have to understand is that dreams are 100% as real as reality for your brain is a signal that you're being sent signal from your senses in reality and When you're dreaming you're getting the same signal. It's just not coming from senses coming from you imagination or other places of the brain, but it feels exactly as the real world. So I remember the first time I lucid dreams, I recognize that I was, I've been training for a while. I'll get to that later. I realized I was dreaming. And I know that one of the most exciting thing you can do in a dream is to take flights. And so I did. And It was not like flying in a video game. I could feel the wind on my face, on my skin. I saw the sunset in the distance, on the horizon. I could feel going up and the gravity changing. It was extremely real. I got so excited, I woke up. But yeah, so lucid dreams, it's something that anybody can do, but it takes a lot, a lot of training. And it's a lot of little technique, doing what we call reality checks. So during your waking life, during the day, you have to check if you're dreaming or not. And by taking this habit of constantly every 15-20 minutes checking if you're dreaming, there's those little funny little tests you can do. if you do that often then you will start by habit to do it in your dreams too and that's a tool to help you awaken in the dream and then there's other technique to prevent the dream from collapsing on you it's the moment you become lucid usually is when you wake up so there's advanced technique of like how to stabilize and stay in the dream but yeah I invite anyone who is interested to there's great books about it just do some research and try it it's amazing And for creators, especially, I find a lot of inspiration. Sometimes something is bothering me, and I study it in a lucid dream. And sometimes the solution presents itself. Sometimes not, but sometimes it does.
[00:39:26.124] Kent Bye: Yeah, I did an interview with Arthur. He runs a Twitter handle called lucidvirtuality. And we had a whole deep dive into lucid dreaming. And he was talking about those reality checks of different things. You can look at clocks, analog clocks, or just do different tests. So what are the different reality tests that you found that you do whenever you ask yourself, am I dreaming? You do something in a dream. And in the matrix, you see a little glitch in the matrix. It's kind of like the equivalent of the glitches of the matrix that give you the cue that you're in a dream and not in your waking life.
[00:39:57.500] Celine Tricart: Yeah, so for a couple of years I was wearing a watch. I stopped wearing watch a long time ago when I got my first smartphone or before smartphones. But I started wearing watches again when I was training for Lucid Dreaming because of the trick is you look at what time is it and then you let the arm go and then you look again and if it's not the same time Then you're dreaming, but it was really annoying to watch so I had to find out a technique so I'm using another technique that makes me look like a crazy person sometimes because I do little jumps and The gravity is very different in a dream and so when you do a little jump in reality you will land back on your feet and be normal, but in In dreams, if you do a little jump, you can just stay up there or have this very weird gravity shifting around you. So that's my reality test. So if you ever see me one day and I make a little jump for no reason, I'm not a crazy person. I'm just doing my reality check.
[00:40:55.516] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. So in talking to you, it's clear to me that you have a very rich symbolic life. And so do you often interpret your dreams in terms of, like, be able to see what the meaning is? Because there's a lot of symbols and metaphors that happen in dreams. And there seems to be a little bit of being fluent in the language of dreams, which I think is interesting. Because if part of VR's medium means that everybody needs to get a little bit more up to speed to paying attention to their dreams and interpreting their dreams, To me, there's a bit of like fluency that would happen there that would require people to do a lot of this depth psychological processes like Jung or just these other whole different traditions, indigenous traditions of being able to interpret dreams. But yeah, I'm just curious if you make the connection between unpacking the symbolism that are in your dreams.
[00:41:43.845] Celine Tricart: I have never learned how to do that and when I did some research about that I found a lot of very different things and it kind of felt like I couldn't find the right answer if I just go on Google or get a couple of books because the books will probably just you know you have all right if you dream of losing your teeth that means you're gonna lose some money very soon or and you look at the next book oh well if you dream of you losing your teeth that means you're missing a family member and so no I was not able to find anything conclusive anything that would work for me so I don't do that I don't try to find significance in my dreams and you know I do believe in synchronicity and lucid dreaming was introduced to me in a very synchronicity moment. And if one day somebody says, hey, this is the book you should be reading about the meaning of your dreams, then I will embrace it. But it hasn't presented itself.
[00:42:40.664] Kent Bye: Yeah, for the past decade, I've been going to different retreats where there's an opportunity in the morning to have a dream cabin, where before you start the day, you have a subsection of the people at that retreat go in, and if there's a dream, people share the dream, and then there's a group that's interpreting it. And what I found from doing this process for the last 10 years is that It's very difficult to understand a dream. If it's a good dream, it's going to be completely, like, mysterious and provocative. But it's going to be, like, emotionally disturbing in a way that it sticks with you. There's going to be something about the dream that has an emotional resonance that you want to kind of figure it out. And what I find happens when you share it in a community of other people that are also fluent in the language of interpreting dreams is that there's, like, a different phase process when it comes into this group dream time. Which, by the way, I think that Eventually, we're gonna get to the point where people are gonna be doing this process in VR where they wake up. Maybe they share the dream Maybe they paint their dream and tell brush But there's something about the moment of just having it and being able to talk about it straight away like waking up and going to a group Process so having this group processes where you share the dream the details of the dream the facts of the dream without any interpretation at all You share what just simply happened and then you add a layer of interpretation. This is what I think it means and And then as a group, you have an opportunity to ask them questions like, what do you think this is? And then there's different things because if it's a community where you know aspects of this person's life, then it's almost like from those many different perspectives, they're able to have different insights and be able to ask questions or be able to reflect things that they already know about them and be able to connect the dots and then ask them questions that does that resonate. And then it's always up to the dreamer. to make the decision about what the meaning of the dream is and not to have other people colonize the dream. So whenever you have like these books that try to say, well, this is what this means, well, it's actually the only person that can say what those things mean are you ultimately. Like the last phase is that once you've had the opportunity to have other people sort of unpack it, then you can look into this sort of universal archetype. So this is what this means in this culture. But from my experience, it's very personal. And the only person that can really know is you. But you have a lot of blind spots. And a lot of times, those dreams are like Freud called it the royal road to the unconscious. And so there's like these unconscious processes that are in some ways trying to work through things. And so it's this dialectic between the known and the unknown of these symbols that are seeping through the images. And they're trying to, in some ways, be these messengers to another part of ourselves that I found deep symbolism in being able to kind of unpack it. It's very difficult to do it by yourself. Even when I have my own dreams and I write them down, a lot of times I perhaps stop writing down my dreams because it's like I'm not being able to get any interpretive value over it. But I think there's something about the community element that's sort of able to unlock the dreams. Anyway, I just wanted to share a little bit of that because I feel like there's an important part of what I think is the unfolding of the potential of the language of VR just seems to be so much tied to dreams.
[00:45:35.934] Celine Tricart: And what you're describing is people going experiencing a VR experience and then sharing about it afterwards and discussing it, which is exactly what's happening here or in any other festival. And I think the community aspect and the exchanging is super important. I agree with you. And the fact that when you describe a dream, I do have a dream journal, obviously, but the fight to write down or explain your dream to other people also place it in a different part of your memory and it sticks with you longer. And then the more you do that, the more you're capable of remembering your dreams, which I think is a great tool to have when people say, oh, I never remember my dreams. There's a few different science factors like when do you wake up and et cetera, et cetera, but also If you make the effort every time you remember a glimpse of a dream is to write it down so you place it in your memory, it will help connect your dream world with your awakened life.
[00:46:34.206] Kent Bye: Well, I had a theory that it was going to be the dreamers, the lucid dreamers, that were going to have like a certain understanding of the VR medium and that I think it's such a new medium that we're still trying to figure it out. But just based upon your own experiences, I could definitely say from my own experience of the work that you've done, and both in Sun Ladies and The Key, that there's something quite potent. Like, I was really emotionally moved when that moment of the reveal of The Refugee, and as I, as you say that now, there's a certain amount of, like, the responsibility of keeping things hidden and veiled, and as people are talking about pieces, or the fact that even this was a collaboration with the Friends of Refugees is, like, within itself a potential spoiler, so it's like, so it's like, A bit of a weird, you know, like when you said, oh, we were trying to keep it hidden. I was like, oh, no, I just sent a tweet out where I think I said refugees. And I was like, you know, there's a sort of like, but I think this is also something to figure out. Like, I have to navigate this all the time as we have these discussions with creators. Like, how much are you going to be spoiling the experience the more that you know? I mean, sometimes it's good to have a little bit of world building, but also, especially with Avengers Endgame coming out this past weekend, like actually like right now, it's just being released. And everything in the topic of the culture is, don't spoil in-game. This is huge. We want to have the experience without having information before we're ready. And I think this experience in particular has that element, where there is spoilers that we have to be aware of.
[00:47:59.953] Celine Tricart: We have been very careful prior to Tribeca not to. We had briefed our PR people. Don't ever made a director statement. Before the premiere, I have a new one now, because I couldn't speak of a lot of the process of making that piece, so I made a fake director's statement. Not a fake one, it was, but... A veiled or a hidden? Yeah, and yes, if you look at the trailer and if you look at the poster, there is a Friend of the Refugee logo there, but nobody ever looks at those logos, so we were like, okay. So nobody actually knew about it until the premiere. Now that the premiere has passed, we really want all the benefit of the publicity around this piece, the fact that we're up for Storyscapes, All this needs to go to Friends of the Refugee. We need to talk about what they do, they need help. So we've decided after the world premiere, which was two days ago, we were okay to talk about it. We're still trying to keep it on the rap a little bit. I just want people to experience it first. But people must know about this piece and what it does and who it is for.
[00:49:03.055] Kent Bye: I feel like there's something about different communities. I could see this as a type of experience to take it into communities for them to see and then have a group discussion. It'd be great to have a bunch of people see it at the same time so then they could see it and then have the discussion without having to wait for everybody to go through it. But logistically, there's tons of problems in the logistics. Yeah, I feel like in the future, just like we were talking about the unpacking of the symbolism of the dream, just like me being able to sit down with you and for you to really explain your process and the symbolism behind what you created. It's like, it's so rich, but it's difficult to just watch it and get it. It's very advanced.
[00:49:38.185] Celine Tricart: Yeah, literally I did not expect people to get all the single little metaphors. And when we did the frame at the end with the reveal, we very purposefully kept only four frames. We could have had ten with every single detail of the metaphor. Four frames, which are the four main dreams, and a little caption that is a one-liner. because again this is not about vomiting facts onto you and trying to force you into caring this is just all right those are some keys to understanding the metaphor and now keep thinking about it there's a lot of people who I've seen today walking out, tearing up and very emotional and say, I can't speak about it now. And they came back like half an hour later and they really had a lot of questions and they wanted to unravel the whole thing. And that's, I love that process. I respect that process. I don't want to be explaining every single thing. There's been a lot of thought going into the experience. Every detail matters really. I can tell you about the object in the cloud house and what they mean. But who cares? Because I want it to be first and foremost an emotional experience and not an intellectual one.
[00:50:47.005] Kent Bye: Yeah, the other really powerful moment at the very end in the installation, at least that's here at Tribeca, is after you see all the different panels, then the docent or the immersive theater actress who's representing the main character in the story then gives you a key that then you are carrying around. This is after realizing that this is a thing that is a part of the whole culture of holding an object that represents all those memories that are now gone. which, you know, just even thinking about it was also a really powerful moment to have a physical object to be able to take out of and to be walking around with the key on for anybody that is wearing that is a little bit of a sign that they've in some ways been initiated into this community, that they've had the experience so they kind of know what that means.
[00:51:30.185] Celine Tricart: You can talk to those people about the reveal because they know, yeah, we wanted this to be kind of a visual hint of, okay, they've been through it, it's okay to talk about it to them. And also, it's just nice, you know? And I'm gonna say, I didn't invent this. At Sundance last year, I think it was the same year as Sun Ladies, there was Hero. And after you go through the Hero VR experience, they give you back your credentials and you have a little piece of fabric attached to it. And I found it was just a brilliant idea of looking around the VR crowd and seeing those pieces of fabric and say, oh, you've seen Hero. And so it was such an impactful thing for me. The piece of fabric didn't have real meaning. It was a fabric you find a lot in Syria and Iraq. So I wanted to take that genius idea they had into the next level, which make it a little bit more meaningful. And those skis are so cute, too. I mean, everybody has a different one. So people are looking at each other's skis like, oh, you got this one and I got that one. It creates a nice little social moment, you know.
[00:52:31.437] Kent Bye: And I feel like there's a bit of the thing that happens in community and initiation is that there's a barrier of a shared experience. And it's a visual indicator that you've in some ways been initiated into this experience where now you've been initiated, you have a shared experience, and now it's created a context. especially that's represented by the symbol of the key that people are wearing on their lanyards, that it can start to make different connections. Because someone said, oh, what is that? That's the key. Oh, that's the key. That's from the key. Oh, I meant to see that, but I didn't get to see it, and I missed it. Or something, you know, kind of like it brings it up. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that is able to actually connect people over the course of the rest of the conference here.
[00:53:07.433] Celine Tricart: Yeah, I hope it's going to be one of the things that will get people to want to see it. I want as many people as possible to see it. It's frustrating to be. in this setup where we only have two rooms. The experience is about 20 minutes long, so there is only that many people who will be able to see it. But that being said, we are talking to the festivals, obviously, but also museums, where we are hoping to be bringing the key next.
[00:53:33.737] Kent Bye: Great. And so for you, what are some of the either biggest open problems you're trying to solve or open questions that you're trying to answer with your work?
[00:53:43.490] Celine Tricart: Oh my god, this is a very deep question. No, I mean the reason why I decided to work in the film industry in the first place is because when I grew up I spent more time reading books and in my imaginary world than in the real world and that was my my happy place and the world of those stories I was reading in books was just as real as the real world for me and through books I was living a thousand extraordinary adventures that were bigger than life. When I grew up and became a teenager I started doing LARPing, live action role-playing games, In France, it's a little bit different. I know in the US, you have this stereotype of foam swords, and you just, like, you know, go on a battlefield with foam swords. But in France, we do what we call Nordic games, which are usually extremely immersive, extremely emotional, week-and-long experience where you're a character in a story. And then, yeah, the next step with the filmmaking and the VR is in the same vein of, I just want to make people escape the real world for a little bit, take them into a bubble. tell them the story I have to tell them, make them dream a little bit, and then very gently returning them to the real world. I think that's a beautiful job. I'm very grateful I can be in this industry and be a storyteller. And yeah.
[00:55:09.307] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling is? And what do I want people to enable?
[00:55:20.687] Celine Tricart: You know, I'm one of those weirdos who think we are in some kind of simulation right now. So we are creating another layer of simulation on top of all the simulations. And I guess if whatever we do, we do it in this kind, loving mindset, I think we can make the next layer more safe and happier than this one. And that's what I hope virtual reality will help create.
[00:55:50.793] Kent Bye: Great. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:55:58.517] Celine Tricart: No, I'm very grateful to be at Rebecca obviously I Really want to say that there is no better feeling to make a project that serve the greater good and some very stereotypical but When I met the Sun ladies two years ago was the first time I was getting into documentary real-world real issue I just wanted to make action movies and And so I've never been happier as a storyteller than making stories that I deeply care about and that I think can be of a little help. So I would really encourage other storytellers to think about what they care about and try to see how their beautiful creativity can do to try to help whatever they care about, the cause, the social good that they feel attached to.
[00:56:50.639] Kent Bye: Just to unpack that a little bit more, have you had a chance to show the Sun Ladies that participated in the film, the final piece, and what were the reactions to that, as well as the reactions to The Prince of Refugees, to the key?
[00:57:04.551] Celine Tricart: Now you're going to make me cry. Yeah, two months ago and went back to Iraq. So what happened after Sundance? So we premiered at Sundance. When people saw the Sun Ladies, we had set up table and chairs and some piece of paper. And we told the people, if you want to, you can sit down and write a personal letter to the Sun Ladies. And we're like, I don't know if that's gonna work, but we'll see. Well, over the course of the festival we've been to with the Sun Ladies, we've collected about 1,500 letters. So here I am, I have 1,500 letters, handwritten, of people for the Sun Ladies. And what am I gonna do with that? So we did a Kickstarter campaign that helped raise some money so I could translate most of those letters, not all of them, but there was a lot of very similar letters or drawings, which were beautiful too. And then me and one of my producers, Dylan Roberts, we went back to Iraq two months ago, and I was able to find the Sun Ladies again. We brought some Oculus Go with us. The moment Rateh Shingali, which is the captain of Sun, the main character in the Sun Ladies, she saw me, she recognized me, we, like, hugged and cried. And then I showed them their film, and even though they don't understand English, They were in tears. They were blown away. Yeah, I mean, they said very, very nice thing to me about belonging with them. And, you know, they were extremely proud because here's the thing about those women and other other people in war zones is they get to meet a lot of journalists and get interviewed by a lot of journalists. And they have to tell those very difficult stories of their life. And then the journalist disappears and run the story who, you know, who cares where and their life doesn't change at all. So they get exhausted of telling their story and not changing anything. And so that was the first time that they saw the results and somebody cared enough to come back and show it to them. And that's when I gave the letters and she sat down. I have beautiful photos and videos of her. She read every single, we took freaking forever and she read all the letters. And what we did is we connected with a nonprofit based in Dohuk, the North of Iraq called Yazda. Yazda is helping documenting the genocide against the Yazidis by collecting witness accounts because they want to try to go to next steps to go to court against ISIS prisoners and, you know, make sure they get the punishment they deserve for crimes against humanity and not just terrorism or whatever. Right now, there's only been lawsuits for terrorism, but there is actually, there's been rape, kidnapping, and et cetera. And so they were setting up this interview room where they were getting the Yazidi woman to come and tell their story and save all those documents for the future trials. because it's very difficult for women to tell their stories they had set a relaxation room next to it so when they don't feel well they can go and sit down and so the letters are being put on the walls of that relaxation room and so when the women go there to relax they will be able to see those letters of love from all the audiences and they will be able to go and take the letters and keep it for themselves. So that's what happened. It makes me so happy because it was full circle for me. It was two years after shooting the movie, one year after the premiere at Sundance, and we were able to deliver the result directly to them. That was incredible.
[01:00:35.672] Kent Bye: Wow, that is absolutely amazing. And what has been the reaction of the Friends of Refugees? Have they seen your piece? Because I imagine they probably weren't expecting a piece like this, but what was their reaction when they saw it, or their reaction to see how people are reacting to it?
[01:00:51.453] Celine Tricart: Yeah, they were part of the process. They were very respectful of my vision. I sent them the script, I sent them the visuals, so they knew. But when both Brian and Lauren, who were my two key people there, saw it for the first time, they were both in tears. And actually we had one woman this morning, she did the experience and she came out crying and she was like, that's not something I talk about, but I was myself a child refugee. And that's something that I kind of thought it was in the past. Like I didn't want to think about it. I don't, I didn't care. It's not that it was painful. I didn't really care anymore. And like, and she said that the key helper kind of make peace with those memories and like, Taking them back into her life a little bit. But that being said we haven't yet had Current refugees from Georgia from Clarkston see the experience.
[01:01:45.120] Kent Bye: So that's gonna be our next step Awesome great well just thank you so much for all the work that you're doing and for sitting down and Unpacking your process and journey and and creating this piece of the key. So thank you.
[01:01:57.748] Celine Tricart: Thank you so much for time
[01:01:59.426] Kent Bye: So that was Celine Tricart. She's the director and producer of The Key. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, The Key went on to win the Storyscapes Award at Tribeca, as well as it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. So there is something really there in terms of the deeper symbolic language that Celine's using with this kind of dream logic embodied metaphors. So Celine is a lucid dreamer, which I think is super fascinating to know that she's got this deep understanding of dreams and dream logic and being able to like experience dreams. And she tells the story of seeing the HTC Vive for the first time. And then she's basically like down in tears, realizing that finally she's able to experience a medium that is able to replicate some of the things she's able to experience within lucid dreaming. And at that point, she knew that this was her medium that she was going to be working with. She was really grinding and doing a lot of work as a 360 degrees cinematographer, really got a great break on the Sun Ladies to be able to shoot that piece, but then took it upon herself to then continue to produce and to work with the post-production and the editing and really just became a co-director on that piece. And from there, I was able to get into the Oculus for good. Each year allows different people to apply to become a part of that program. And she had been rejected a few years, really felt dejected and then was encouraged. by friend and then join and then actually got into the Oculus for good program, got paired up with the Friends of Refugees and then, you know, really wanted to take a different take because there are a lot of traditional 360 degree films. And she had been to refugee camps and knew that, you know, it's very difficult story to tell as well as a very difficult story to get people to care about. And so I think the magic of what she's able to do in the key is to give you these dream-like experiences you don't quite know what's happening you're a little bit confused and you're just going through these different embodied interactions and as you have these different companions there's very early during the storm you have to make a choice there's three companions you can only at most carry two of them and so as you let go of some of the companions then that's going from the cloud-like world down to the elevator into this new reality and then before you get out of the elevator you have to give up another companion and each time one of the companions gets taken away then that color palette becomes taken away from that experience so then it becomes more and more gray And there's a lot of different symbols that, you know, Celine was like, she doesn't really care if you get all of those different aspects of the symbols, but there's something in a way that this type of experience works is that your brain doesn't really matter either. It just has these embodied experiences. It may be paying attention to some of these subtle things. It may not be able to kind of clock the fact that the color palette is changing. And then there's this contrast after you go and wait in this bank long line. you get their last companion taken away and basically you're left with nothing except for this visa stamp and then you go into this new world which is like this magical underwater world you put on the helmet and then all the color comes back and then you're kind of guided into this new world with this other kind of mermaid like creature which is kind of a symbol for the Friends of Refugees who are taking in these refugees after they have potentially lost everything and trying to help them apply for different jobs and to get into their new life. The fact that there's like on average a refugee may be in a refugee camp for 26 years I think is pretty staggering that there's only like 30 different countries around the world that are even accepting refugees So there's a lot of these people that are in these refugee camps that are in this limbo state and to hear different stories about Going through these different checkpoints and then actually having to like give up your daughter to isis at the checkpoints. Um It's pretty unimaginable what that would go like. I mean, you're going through the VR experience and you kind of have like this loss of these different entities that you're carrying. You don't quite know why they're your companions. And then there is a sense of loss that you have. And so, but there's nothing that could really compare to the loss that you have of your actual home and your actual family. It sounds like the Fringe of Refugees goes through this whole loss simulation where you go through and you write down different aspects of your family and different names of your loved ones, some of your possessions, some of your hobbies, and then you have to kind of go through the list and only be able to choose one of those. So I think there's a lot of really deep innovations that are happening here in terms of like really taking a different take, a really poetic take to some of these different issues and topics. You know, if you look through the different back catalog of a lot of the Oculus for good experiences, a lot of them have taken the more realistic approach of just the pure documentary, really trying to document what's happening and either do narration or to have like kind of an edited version of all these different. Voices she wanted to have onboarding and offboarding was very important for Celine and she really sees going into a VR experience as a violent experience. And so she wants to, as much as possible, minimize going into a VR experience. And so having that sound caller, having the voice of the actress that you're about to go into a virtual experience with have that consistent. audio track that as you go in and you have this face-to-face interactions with this immersive theater actress who kind of gives you a little bit of a tour and helps actually put on the VR headset and then as you come out then you are going to these different panels and panes and you're kind of unpacking each of the different scenes of the experience that you just went through and giving a little bit more of the facts and so To me, it feels very similar to something like what Jordan Peele has been doing with either Get Out or Us, where there's like these deep metaphors and symbols within these films and that you watch the film, sometimes it's like completely obvious about what everything means. And sometimes very explicitly within the film itself, they're saying, okay, this is a metaphor for America. But there's also just so many different aspects that you can kind of keep going, going and going with all the deep symbolism that's kind of embedded with that piece. And I think that there's a similar process that's happening with what Selene is doing here with embedding a lot of deep symbolism within these experiences so that it gives you a bit of a direct experience of loss and these embodied interactions. You're making these different choices. You're having to kind of wait in these different lines and then. at the big reveal at the very end after being in this kind of dreamlike experience and then all of a sudden you're in this photogrammetry experience which is a very real home that has been completely destroyed at the very beginning she has you in this cloud city and she modeled that home upon the same sort of layout and so there's all these subtle cues that you may not consciously be aware of but you're kind of being primed to be like oh wow For me, it was just a really powerful experience to kind of see those connections be made because you're in this weird dreamlike state and you don't quite know what things means. And then when you unpack it, then it just like really hits you. And I've talked to other people who knew what the symbolism is and they knew what it was all about refugees and it's still a super powerful for them as well. And so. I think Celine wanted to really keep the fact that it was about refugees kind of hidden. So there's like this narrative twist at the end that is the reveal that she saw as this big spoiler and wanted to keep it really secret and hidden and I think did a really good job of that of Tribeca. Hopefully it will be made available here on the Oculus Home Store at some point. She did have it on Oculus Quest at Venice whereas it was on the like the Rift back at Oculus Connect. So being able to really optimize it to get it down to actually distribute it out, I think is one of the challenges of doing virtual reality experiences. But she was able to pull it off at Venice. And then it's also going to be shown at Oculus Connect, which is coming up here this coming week. So excited to have much more people out there see it and then be able to listen to this to kind of unpack it and to get a lot more information and context about that experience. And just kind of a meta comment is that again this is a very kind of chicken-and-egg type of problem where there are a lot of these different innovative projects that are being shown at these festivals like Sundance and South by Southwest and Tribeca and the Venice Film Festival and there hasn't been necessarily a lot of focus or the coverage within the wider VR industry because there's a bit of this chicken-and-egg problem where there's no distribution and then so people can't actually see them you actually have to be there to see it and So that does seem like some of these experiences like the key because it won at Tribeca and won the award at Venice Hopefully it's able to get out there and to have people to be able to actually see some of these Experiences and to really see some of the innovations that are happening within storytelling within virtual reality but also just these different aspects of the dreamlike quality that this experience had and I really did feel like I was walking through a dream. And this interesting balance between the personal metaphors and the universal metaphors, where the metaphors in this experience weren't necessarily immediately obvious of what it was about. There wasn't necessarily an immediate, like, oh, this is exactly what this experience is all about. But I think that's exciting to see that there's going to be a lot more exploration of this type of dream logic and symbolism within the storytelling language of VR. And there's another experience that I saw at Venice called Bodyless that I'll be diving into next that really goes super deep into this kind of like dreamlike experience and has a mechanic where you're kind of flying around. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listeners-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from listeners like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. Just $5 a month is a great amount to give. That just allows me to continue to do the real-time oral history of the evolution of the spatial storytelling and spatial computing. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
